# Googlebot vs OAI-SearchBot

Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

| Field | Googlebot | OAI-SearchBot | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | yes | yes | same |
| honours_crawl_delay | no | not_documented | different |
| observed_arrival_before_sitemap | not documented | yes | different |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | 0.991 | not documented | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | search | search | same |
| reads_llms_txt | no | not_documented | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | yes | yes | same |
| user_agent_string_full | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) | Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | yes | not_documented | different |

## Differences

| Field | Googlebot statement | OAI-SearchBot statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| honours_crawl_delay | Google does not support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive for Googlebot. | OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-SearchBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive. |
| observed_arrival_before_sitemap | not documented | OAI-SearchBot first requested Rattlesnakes By Mail at 2026-09-13T21:41:14Z, before the Rattlesnakes By Mail sitemap was submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools shortly before 2026-09-15T08:38Z and to Google Search Console at 2026-09-15T09:00Z. OAI-SearchBot made 3 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, all 3 to /robots.txt. |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | Googlebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z. | not documented |
| reads_llms_txt | Google Search does not use llms.txt files. | OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-SearchBot reads llms.txt files. |
| user_agent_string_full | Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html). | OAI-SearchBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot. |
| verifiable_by_rdns | Googlebot requests are verifiable by reverse DNS lookup resolving to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com. | OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for OAI-SearchBot. |

## Sources

- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verifying-googlebot
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
- https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googlebot
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot